SummaryThis long-term research project is based on the data-mining of the Llibres d'Esposalles conserved at the Archives of the Barcelona Cathedral, an extraordinary data source comprising 244 books of marriage licenses records. It covers about 550.000 unions from over 250 parishes of the Diocese between 1451 and 1905. Its impeccable conservation is a miracle in a region where parish archives have undergone massive destruction. The books include data on the tax posed on each couple depending on their social class, on an eight-tiered scale. These data allow for research on multiple aspects of demographic research, especially on the very long run, such as: population estimates, marriage dynamics, cycles, and indirect estimations for fertility, migration and survival, as well as socio-economic studies related to social homogamy, social mobility, and transmission of social and occupational position. Being continuous over five centuries, the source constitutes a unique instrument to study the dynamics of population distribution, the expansion of the city of Barcelona and the constitution of its metropolitan area, as well as the chronology and the geography in the constitution of new social classes.
To this end, a digital library and a database, the Barcelona Historical Marriages Database (BHiMaD), are to be created and completed. An ERC-AG will help doing so while undertaking the research analysis of the database in parallel.
The research team, at the U. Autònoma de Barcelona, involves researchers from the Center for Demo-graphic Studies and the Computer Vision Center experts in historical databases and computer-aided recognition of ancient manuscripts. 5CofM will serve the preservation of the original “Llibres d’Esposalles” and unlock the full potential embedded in the collection.

This long-term research project is based on the data-mining of the Llibres d'Esposalles conserved at the Archives of the Barcelona Cathedral, an extraordinary data source comprising 244 books of marriage licenses records. It covers about 550.000 unions from over 250 parishes of the Diocese between 1451 and 1905. Its impeccable conservation is a miracle in a region where parish archives have undergone massive destruction. The books include data on the tax posed on each couple depending on their social class, on an eight-tiered scale. These data allow for research on multiple aspects of demographic research, especially on the very long run, such as: population estimates, marriage dynamics, cycles, and indirect estimations for fertility, migration and survival, as well as socio-economic studies related to social homogamy, social mobility, and transmission of social and occupational position. Being continuous over five centuries, the source constitutes a unique instrument to study the dynamics of population distribution, the expansion of the city of Barcelona and the constitution of its metropolitan area, as well as the chronology and the geography in the constitution of new social classes.
To this end, a digital library and a database, the Barcelona Historical Marriages Database (BHiMaD), are to be created and completed. An ERC-AG will help doing so while undertaking the research analysis of the database in parallel.
The research team, at the U. Autònoma de Barcelona, involves researchers from the Center for Demo-graphic Studies and the Computer Vision Center experts in historical databases and computer-aided recognition of ancient manuscripts. 5CofM will serve the preservation of the original “Llibres d’Esposalles” and unlock the full potential embedded in the collection.

Max ERC Funding

1 847 400 €

Duration

Start date: 2011-05-01, End date: 2016-04-30

Project acronymADAPT

ProjectLife in a cold climate: the adaptation of cereals to new environments and the establishment of agriculture in Europe

Researcher (PI)Terence Austen Brown

Host Institution (HI)THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

Call DetailsAdvanced Grant (AdG), SH6, ERC-2013-ADG

Summary"This project explores the concept of agricultural spread as analogous to enforced climate change and asks how cereals adapted to new environments when agriculture was introduced into Europe. Archaeologists have long recognized that the ecological pressures placed on crops would have had an impact on the spread and subsequent development of agriculture, but previously there has been no means of directly assessing the scale and nature of this impact. Recent work that I have directed has shown how such a study could be carried out, and the purpose of this project is to exploit these breakthroughs with the goal of assessing the influence of environmental adaptation on the spread of agriculture, its adoption as the primary subsistence strategy, and the subsequent establishment of farming in different parts of Europe. This will correct the current imbalance between our understanding of the human and environmental dimensions to the domestication of Europe. I will use methods from population genomics to identify loci within the barley and wheat genomes that have undergone selection since the beginning of cereal cultivation in Europe. I will then use ecological modelling to identify those loci whose patterns of selection are associated with ecogeographical variables and hence represent adaptations to local environmental conditions. I will assign dates to the periods when adaptations occurred by sequencing ancient DNA from archaeobotanical assemblages and by computer methods that enable the temporal order of adaptations to be deduced. I will then synthesise the information on environmental adaptations with dating evidence for the spread of agriculture in Europe, which reveals pauses that might be linked to environmental adaptation, with demographic data that indicate regions where Neolithic populations declined, possibly due to inadequate crop productivity, and with an archaeobotanical database showing changes in the prevalence of individual cereals in different regions."

"This project explores the concept of agricultural spread as analogous to enforced climate change and asks how cereals adapted to new environments when agriculture was introduced into Europe. Archaeologists have long recognized that the ecological pressures placed on crops would have had an impact on the spread and subsequent development of agriculture, but previously there has been no means of directly assessing the scale and nature of this impact. Recent work that I have directed has shown how such a study could be carried out, and the purpose of this project is to exploit these breakthroughs with the goal of assessing the influence of environmental adaptation on the spread of agriculture, its adoption as the primary subsistence strategy, and the subsequent establishment of farming in different parts of Europe. This will correct the current imbalance between our understanding of the human and environmental dimensions to the domestication of Europe. I will use methods from population genomics to identify loci within the barley and wheat genomes that have undergone selection since the beginning of cereal cultivation in Europe. I will then use ecological modelling to identify those loci whose patterns of selection are associated with ecogeographical variables and hence represent adaptations to local environmental conditions. I will assign dates to the periods when adaptations occurred by sequencing ancient DNA from archaeobotanical assemblages and by computer methods that enable the temporal order of adaptations to be deduced. I will then synthesise the information on environmental adaptations with dating evidence for the spread of agriculture in Europe, which reveals pauses that might be linked to environmental adaptation, with demographic data that indicate regions where Neolithic populations declined, possibly due to inadequate crop productivity, and with an archaeobotanical database showing changes in the prevalence of individual cereals in different regions."

Max ERC Funding

2 492 964 €

Duration

Start date: 2014-02-01, End date: 2019-01-31

Project acronymAGRIWESTMED

ProjectOrigins and spread of agriculture in the south-western Mediterranean region

SummaryThis project focuses on one of the most fascinating events of the long history of the human species: the origins and spread of agriculture. Research over the past 40 years has provided an invaluable dataset on crop domestication and the spread of agriculture into Europe. However, despite the enormous advances in research there are important areas that remain almost unexplored, some of immense interest. This is the case of the western Mediterranean region from where our knowledge is still limited (Iberian Peninsula) or almost inexistent (northern Morocco). The last few years have witnessed a considerable increase in archaeobotany and the effort of a group of Spanish researchers working together in different aspects of agriculture has started to produce the first results. My proposal will approach the study of the arrival of agriculture to the western Mediterranean by exploring different interrelated research areas. The project involves the
application of different techniques (analysis of charred plant remains, pollen and non-pollen microfossils, phytoliths, micro-wear analyses, isotopes, soil micromorphology, genetics, and ethnoarchaeology) which will help to define the emergence and spread of agriculture in the area, its likely place of origin, its main technological attributes as well as the range crop husbandry practices carried out. The interaction between the different approaches and the methodologies involved will allow achieving a greater understanding of the type of agriculture that characterized the first farming communities in the most south-western part of Europe.

This project focuses on one of the most fascinating events of the long history of the human species: the origins and spread of agriculture. Research over the past 40 years has provided an invaluable dataset on crop domestication and the spread of agriculture into Europe. However, despite the enormous advances in research there are important areas that remain almost unexplored, some of immense interest. This is the case of the western Mediterranean region from where our knowledge is still limited (Iberian Peninsula) or almost inexistent (northern Morocco). The last few years have witnessed a considerable increase in archaeobotany and the effort of a group of Spanish researchers working together in different aspects of agriculture has started to produce the first results. My proposal will approach the study of the arrival of agriculture to the western Mediterranean by exploring different interrelated research areas. The project involves the
application of different techniques (analysis of charred plant remains, pollen and non-pollen microfossils, phytoliths, micro-wear analyses, isotopes, soil micromorphology, genetics, and ethnoarchaeology) which will help to define the emergence and spread of agriculture in the area, its likely place of origin, its main technological attributes as well as the range crop husbandry practices carried out. The interaction between the different approaches and the methodologies involved will allow achieving a greater understanding of the type of agriculture that characterized the first farming communities in the most south-western part of Europe.

Max ERC Funding

1 545 169 €

Duration

Start date: 2009-04-01, End date: 2013-03-31

Project acronymBABE

ProjectBodies across borders: oral and visual memory in Europe and beyond

Researcher (PI)Luisella Passerini

Host Institution (HI)EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE

Call DetailsAdvanced Grant (AdG), SH6, ERC-2011-ADG_20110406

SummaryThis project intends to study intercultural connections in contemporary Europe, engaging both native and ‘new’ Europeans. These connections are woven through the faculties of embodied subjects – memory, visuality and mobility – and concern the movement of people, ideas and images across the borders of European nation-states. These faculties are connected with that of affect, an increasingly important concept in history and the social sciences. Memory will be understood not only as oral or direct memory, but also as cultural memory, embodied in various cultural products. Our study aims to understand new forms of European identity, as these develop in an increasingly diasporic world. Europe today is not only a key site of immigration, after having been for centuries an area of emigration, but also a crucial point of arrival in a global network designed by mobile human beings.
Three parts will make up the project. The first will engage with bodies, their gendered dimension, performative capacities and connection to place. It will explore the ways certain bodies are ‘emplaced’ as ‘European’, while others are marked as alien, and contrast these discourses with the counter-narratives by visual artists. The second part will extend further the reflection on the role of the visual arts in challenging an emergent ‘Fortress Europe’ but also in re-imagining the memory of European colonialism. The work of some key artists will be shown to students in Italy and the Netherlands, both recent migrants and ‘natives’, creating an ‘induced reception’. The final part of the project will look at alternative imaginations of Europe, investigating the oral memories and ‘mental maps’ created by two migrant communities in Europe: from Peru and from the Horn of Africa.
Examining the heterogeneous micro-productions of mobility – whether ‘real’ or imagined/envisioned – will thus yield important lessons for the historical understanding of inclusion and exclusion in today’s Europe.

This project intends to study intercultural connections in contemporary Europe, engaging both native and ‘new’ Europeans. These connections are woven through the faculties of embodied subjects – memory, visuality and mobility – and concern the movement of people, ideas and images across the borders of European nation-states. These faculties are connected with that of affect, an increasingly important concept in history and the social sciences. Memory will be understood not only as oral or direct memory, but also as cultural memory, embodied in various cultural products. Our study aims to understand new forms of European identity, as these develop in an increasingly diasporic world. Europe today is not only a key site of immigration, after having been for centuries an area of emigration, but also a crucial point of arrival in a global network designed by mobile human beings.
Three parts will make up the project. The first will engage with bodies, their gendered dimension, performative capacities and connection to place. It will explore the ways certain bodies are ‘emplaced’ as ‘European’, while others are marked as alien, and contrast these discourses with the counter-narratives by visual artists. The second part will extend further the reflection on the role of the visual arts in challenging an emergent ‘Fortress Europe’ but also in re-imagining the memory of European colonialism. The work of some key artists will be shown to students in Italy and the Netherlands, both recent migrants and ‘natives’, creating an ‘induced reception’. The final part of the project will look at alternative imaginations of Europe, investigating the oral memories and ‘mental maps’ created by two migrant communities in Europe: from Peru and from the Horn of Africa.
Examining the heterogeneous micro-productions of mobility – whether ‘real’ or imagined/envisioned – will thus yield important lessons for the historical understanding of inclusion and exclusion in today’s Europe.

Max ERC Funding

1 488 501 €

Duration

Start date: 2013-06-01, End date: 2018-05-31

Project acronymBaSaR

ProjectBeyond the Silk Road: Economic Development, Frontier Zones and Inter-Imperiality in the Afro-Eurasian World Region, 300 BCE to 300 CE

Researcher (PI)Sitta VON REDEN

Host Institution (HI)ALBERT-LUDWIGS-UNIVERSITAET FREIBURG

Call DetailsAdvanced Grant (AdG), SH6, ERC-2016-ADG

SummaryThis interdisciplinary project will show that inter-imperial zones and small to mid-size regional networks of exchange were crucial for ancient Transeurasian exchange connections. It will demonstrate the significance of exchange in imperial frontier zones emerging from political, economic, infrastructural, institutional and technological development within empires. This will lead to a new conceptual frame for analyzing inter-imperiality and the morphology of exchange networks within and across imperial zones.
The centuries from 300 BCE to 300 CE were a period of accelerated empire transformation involving also new regions of the Afro-Eurasian world. Consumption centres shifted, affecting production, settlement, and regional exchange networks. They changed the dynamics of exchange, created new geographies, and greater cultural convergence between imperial spheres of influence. The development of imperial frontier zones of intense exchange and mobility (e.g. Northern China, Bactria, Gandhara, Syria, and the Red Sea/Gulf/Indian Ocean coasts) was related to imperial hinterlands, their fiscal-military-administrative regimes, the development of media of exchange and infrastructures, settlement, urban growth, and so on. It was also related to new forms and levels of consumption in imperial centres. In order to understand Transeurasian connectivity, the interdependence of frontier zone and inner-imperial development is crucial. We will reveal that competitions for social power within empires mobilized and concentrated resources reclaimed from natural landscapes and subsistence economies. Greater mobility of resources, both human and material, endowed competitions for power with economic force, feeding into inter-imperial prestige economies and trade. This new model of Afro-Eurasian connectivity will abandon some problematic assumptions of Silk Road trade, while maintaining the Afro-Eurasian macro-region as a meaningful unit for cultural and economic analysis.

This interdisciplinary project will show that inter-imperial zones and small to mid-size regional networks of exchange were crucial for ancient Transeurasian exchange connections. It will demonstrate the significance of exchange in imperial frontier zones emerging from political, economic, infrastructural, institutional and technological development within empires. This will lead to a new conceptual frame for analyzing inter-imperiality and the morphology of exchange networks within and across imperial zones.
The centuries from 300 BCE to 300 CE were a period of accelerated empire transformation involving also new regions of the Afro-Eurasian world. Consumption centres shifted, affecting production, settlement, and regional exchange networks. They changed the dynamics of exchange, created new geographies, and greater cultural convergence between imperial spheres of influence. The development of imperial frontier zones of intense exchange and mobility (e.g. Northern China, Bactria, Gandhara, Syria, and the Red Sea/Gulf/Indian Ocean coasts) was related to imperial hinterlands, their fiscal-military-administrative regimes, the development of media of exchange and infrastructures, settlement, urban growth, and so on. It was also related to new forms and levels of consumption in imperial centres. In order to understand Transeurasian connectivity, the interdependence of frontier zone and inner-imperial development is crucial. We will reveal that competitions for social power within empires mobilized and concentrated resources reclaimed from natural landscapes and subsistence economies. Greater mobility of resources, both human and material, endowed competitions for power with economic force, feeding into inter-imperial prestige economies and trade. This new model of Afro-Eurasian connectivity will abandon some problematic assumptions of Silk Road trade, while maintaining the Afro-Eurasian macro-region as a meaningful unit for cultural and economic analysis.

Max ERC Funding

2 498 750 €

Duration

Start date: 2017-09-01, End date: 2022-08-31

Project acronymBM

ProjectBecoming Muslim: Conversion to Islam and Islamisation in Eastern Ethiopia

Researcher (PI)Timothy Insoll

Host Institution (HI)THE UNIVERSITY OF EXETER

Call DetailsAdvanced Grant (AdG), SH6, ERC-2015-AdG

Summary"Why do people convert to Islam? The contemporary relevance of this question is immediately apparent. "Becoming Muslim" will transform our knowledge about Islamisation processes and contexts through archaeological research in Harar, Eastern Ethiopia, and examine this in comparison to other regions in sub-Saharan Africa via publication and a major conference. Assessing genuine belief is difficult, but the impact of trade, Saints, Sufis and Holy men, proselytisation, benefits gained from Arabic literacy and administration systems, enhanced power, prestige, warfare, and belonging to the larger Muslim community have all been suggested. Equally significant is the context of conversion. Why were certain sub-Saharan African cities key points for conversion to Islam, e.g. Gao and Timbuktu in the Western Sahel, and Harar in Ethiopia? Archaeological engagement with Islamisation processes and contexts of conversion in Africa is variable, and in parts of the continent research is static. This exciting 4-year project explores, for the first time, Islamic conversion and Islamisation through focusing on Harar, the most important living Islamic centre in the Horn of Africa, and its surrounding region.
Islamic archaeology has been neglected in Ethiopia, and is wholly non-existent in Harar. Excavation at 5 key sites: 2 shrines, 2 abandoned settlements, 1 urban site, will permit evaluation of urban Islam, the veneration of saints, pilgrimage and shrine based practices, rural Islam, architecture and jihad, changes in lifeways, and early and comparative evidence for Islam and long-distance trade, through analysis of, e.g. architecture, epigraphy, burial orientation, imported artifacts, and faunal and botanical remains. Although it is fully acknowledged that conversion to Islam and Islamisation processes are not universal, my project is groundbreaking in developing and applying a transferable methodology for the archaeological explanation of "Becoming Muslim" in sub-Saharan Africa."

"Why do people convert to Islam? The contemporary relevance of this question is immediately apparent. "Becoming Muslim" will transform our knowledge about Islamisation processes and contexts through archaeological research in Harar, Eastern Ethiopia, and examine this in comparison to other regions in sub-Saharan Africa via publication and a major conference. Assessing genuine belief is difficult, but the impact of trade, Saints, Sufis and Holy men, proselytisation, benefits gained from Arabic literacy and administration systems, enhanced power, prestige, warfare, and belonging to the larger Muslim community have all been suggested. Equally significant is the context of conversion. Why were certain sub-Saharan African cities key points for conversion to Islam, e.g. Gao and Timbuktu in the Western Sahel, and Harar in Ethiopia? Archaeological engagement with Islamisation processes and contexts of conversion in Africa is variable, and in parts of the continent research is static. This exciting 4-year project explores, for the first time, Islamic conversion and Islamisation through focusing on Harar, the most important living Islamic centre in the Horn of Africa, and its surrounding region.
Islamic archaeology has been neglected in Ethiopia, and is wholly non-existent in Harar. Excavation at 5 key sites: 2 shrines, 2 abandoned settlements, 1 urban site, will permit evaluation of urban Islam, the veneration of saints, pilgrimage and shrine based practices, rural Islam, architecture and jihad, changes in lifeways, and early and comparative evidence for Islam and long-distance trade, through analysis of, e.g. architecture, epigraphy, burial orientation, imported artifacts, and faunal and botanical remains. Although it is fully acknowledged that conversion to Islam and Islamisation processes are not universal, my project is groundbreaking in developing and applying a transferable methodology for the archaeological explanation of "Becoming Muslim" in sub-Saharan Africa."

SummaryFrom testicular grafting (1920s) to step counting watches (2014), the perceptions and practices of health seeking individuals have been marked by continuities and profound changes during a twentieth century largely shaped by the advent of a communication society. Visuals can be a source to understand transformations by postulating an interactive, performative power of mass media in societies. Which roles did visuals play in changes from public health and human capital collective understandings of the healthy self to new (sometimes debated) perceptions and practices of our bodies as forms of individual capital in an increasing market-economized world?
Pursuing these questions, the project focuses on four fields of investigation -food/nutrition; movement/exercise/sports; sexuality/reproduction/infants and dependency/addiction/overconsumption- in Germany, France and Great Britain studied with an entangled history framework.
Within this scope the project aims at understanding (1)how visuals shape our health related self-understandings and practices in a continuity/discontinuity from the bio-political to the bio-economic logic. (2) The project will explore and explain how and why understandings of body capital differ or overlap in European countries. (3) The project will analyse if and how visual media serve as a promotion-communication hyphen for twentieth century preventive-self understanding.
With a visual perspective on a long twentieth century, the project seeks to better understand changes and continuities in the history of health intertwined with the history of media. This will provide new insights into how the internalization of bodycapital has evolved throughout the past century, how transformations in the media world (from film to TV to internet) play out at the individual level and how health challenges and cultural differences in body perceptions and practices persist in producing social distinction in an age of global information and advanced health systems.

From testicular grafting (1920s) to step counting watches (2014), the perceptions and practices of health seeking individuals have been marked by continuities and profound changes during a twentieth century largely shaped by the advent of a communication society. Visuals can be a source to understand transformations by postulating an interactive, performative power of mass media in societies. Which roles did visuals play in changes from public health and human capital collective understandings of the healthy self to new (sometimes debated) perceptions and practices of our bodies as forms of individual capital in an increasing market-economized world?
Pursuing these questions, the project focuses on four fields of investigation -food/nutrition; movement/exercise/sports; sexuality/reproduction/infants and dependency/addiction/overconsumption- in Germany, France and Great Britain studied with an entangled history framework.
Within this scope the project aims at understanding (1)how visuals shape our health related self-understandings and practices in a continuity/discontinuity from the bio-political to the bio-economic logic. (2) The project will explore and explain how and why understandings of body capital differ or overlap in European countries. (3) The project will analyse if and how visual media serve as a promotion-communication hyphen for twentieth century preventive-self understanding.
With a visual perspective on a long twentieth century, the project seeks to better understand changes and continuities in the history of health intertwined with the history of media. This will provide new insights into how the internalization of bodycapital has evolved throughout the past century, how transformations in the media world (from film to TV to internet) play out at the individual level and how health challenges and cultural differences in body perceptions and practices persist in producing social distinction in an age of global information and advanced health systems.

Max ERC Funding

2 492 124 €

Duration

Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2021-08-31

Project acronymBRONZEAGETIN

ProjectTin Isotopes and the Sources of Bronze Age Tin in the Old World

Researcher (PI)Ernst Pernicka

Host Institution (HI)RUPRECHT-KARLS-UNIVERSITAET HEIDELBERG

Call DetailsAdvanced Grant (AdG), SH6, ERC-2012-ADG_20120411

Summary"This multidisciplinary project comprising archaeology, history, geochemistry, and geology aims at the decipherment of the enigma of the origin of a material that emerged in the third millennium BCE and gave an entire cultural epoch its name, namely the alloy of copper and tin called bronze. While copper deposits are relatively widely distributed there are only very few tin deposits known in the Old World (Europe, the Mediterranean basin and southwest Asia). Since the late 19th century archaeologists have discussed the question of the provenance of tin for the production of the earliest bronzes without any definite answer. The enigma has even grown over the past decades, because it turned out that the earliest bronzes appear in a wide area stretching from the Aegean to the Persian Gulf that is geologically devoid of any tin deposits. There is tin in western and central Europe and there is also tin in central Asia. Thus, tin or bronze seems to have been traded over large distances but it is unknown in which direction.
Now a new method has become available that offers the chance to trace ancient tin via tin isotope signatures. It was found that the isotope ratios of tin exhibit small but measurable variations in nature making different tin deposits identifiable so that bronze objects can in principle be related to specific ore deposits. It is proposed to apply for the first time this new technology to characterize all known tin deposits in the Old World and relate them to bronze and tin artefacts of the third and second millennia BCE. This groundbreaking interdisciplinary study will increase our understanding of Bronze Age metal trade beyond surmise and speculation with vast implications for the reconstruction of socio-economic relations within and between Bronze Age societies. The impact will be a major advance in our understanding of the earliest complex societies with craft specialization and the formation of cities and empires."

"This multidisciplinary project comprising archaeology, history, geochemistry, and geology aims at the decipherment of the enigma of the origin of a material that emerged in the third millennium BCE and gave an entire cultural epoch its name, namely the alloy of copper and tin called bronze. While copper deposits are relatively widely distributed there are only very few tin deposits known in the Old World (Europe, the Mediterranean basin and southwest Asia). Since the late 19th century archaeologists have discussed the question of the provenance of tin for the production of the earliest bronzes without any definite answer. The enigma has even grown over the past decades, because it turned out that the earliest bronzes appear in a wide area stretching from the Aegean to the Persian Gulf that is geologically devoid of any tin deposits. There is tin in western and central Europe and there is also tin in central Asia. Thus, tin or bronze seems to have been traded over large distances but it is unknown in which direction.
Now a new method has become available that offers the chance to trace ancient tin via tin isotope signatures. It was found that the isotope ratios of tin exhibit small but measurable variations in nature making different tin deposits identifiable so that bronze objects can in principle be related to specific ore deposits. It is proposed to apply for the first time this new technology to characterize all known tin deposits in the Old World and relate them to bronze and tin artefacts of the third and second millennia BCE. This groundbreaking interdisciplinary study will increase our understanding of Bronze Age metal trade beyond surmise and speculation with vast implications for the reconstruction of socio-economic relations within and between Bronze Age societies. The impact will be a major advance in our understanding of the earliest complex societies with craft specialization and the formation of cities and empires."

Max ERC Funding

2 340 800 €

Duration

Start date: 2013-08-01, End date: 2018-07-31

Project acronymCALENDARS

ProjectCalendars in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: standardization and fixation

Researcher (PI)Sacha David Stern

Host Institution (HI)UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON

Call DetailsAdvanced Grant (AdG), SH6, ERC-2012-ADG_20120411

SummaryThis project will study how calendars evolved in late antique and medieval societies towards ever increasing standardization and fixation. The study of calendars has been neglected by historians as a technical curiosity; but in fact, the calendar was at the heart of ancient and medieval culture, as a structured concept of time, and as an organizing principle of social life.
The history of calendars in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages was a complex social and cultural process, closely related to politics, science, and religion. The standardization and fixation of calendars was related in Antiquity to the rise of large, centralized empires in the Mediterranean and Near East, and in the Middle Ages, to the rise of the monotheistic, universalist religions of Christianity and Islam. The standardization and fixation of calendars contributed also, more widely, to the formation of a unified and universal culture in the ancient and medieval worlds.
The standardization and fixation of ancient and medieval calendars will be analyzed by focusing on four, specific manifestations of this process: (1) the diffusion and standardization of the seven-day week in the Roman Empire; (2) the production of hemerologia (comparative calendar tables) in late Antiquity; (3) the use of Jewish calendar fixed cycles in medieval manuscripts; (4) the production and diffusion of monographs on the calendar by medieval Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars, especially al-Biruni’s Chronology of the Ancient Nations and Isaac Israeli’s Yesod Olam. Study of these four research areas will enable us to formulate a general interpretation and explanation of how and why calendars became increasingly standardized and fixed.
This will be the first ever study of calendars on this scale, covering a wide range of historical periods and cultures, and involving a wide range of disciplines: social history, ancient and medieval astronomy and mathematics, study of religions, literature, epigraphy, and codicology.

This project will study how calendars evolved in late antique and medieval societies towards ever increasing standardization and fixation. The study of calendars has been neglected by historians as a technical curiosity; but in fact, the calendar was at the heart of ancient and medieval culture, as a structured concept of time, and as an organizing principle of social life.
The history of calendars in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages was a complex social and cultural process, closely related to politics, science, and religion. The standardization and fixation of calendars was related in Antiquity to the rise of large, centralized empires in the Mediterranean and Near East, and in the Middle Ages, to the rise of the monotheistic, universalist religions of Christianity and Islam. The standardization and fixation of calendars contributed also, more widely, to the formation of a unified and universal culture in the ancient and medieval worlds.
The standardization and fixation of ancient and medieval calendars will be analyzed by focusing on four, specific manifestations of this process: (1) the diffusion and standardization of the seven-day week in the Roman Empire; (2) the production of hemerologia (comparative calendar tables) in late Antiquity; (3) the use of Jewish calendar fixed cycles in medieval manuscripts; (4) the production and diffusion of monographs on the calendar by medieval Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars, especially al-Biruni’s Chronology of the Ancient Nations and Isaac Israeli’s Yesod Olam. Study of these four research areas will enable us to formulate a general interpretation and explanation of how and why calendars became increasingly standardized and fixed.
This will be the first ever study of calendars on this scale, covering a wide range of historical periods and cultures, and involving a wide range of disciplines: social history, ancient and medieval astronomy and mathematics, study of religions, literature, epigraphy, and codicology.

Max ERC Funding

2 499 006 €

Duration

Start date: 2013-02-01, End date: 2018-01-31

Project acronymCLCLCL

ProjectCivil Law, Common Law, Customary Law: Consonance, Divergence and Transformation in Western Europe from the late eleventh to the thirteenth centuries

Researcher (PI)John HUDSON

Host Institution (HI)THE UNIVERSITY COURT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS

Call DetailsAdvanced Grant (AdG), SH6, ERC-2016-ADG

SummaryA highly significant division in present-day Europe is between two types of legal system: the Continental with foundations in Civil Law (law with an ultimately Roman law basis), and English Common Law. Both trace their continuous history back to the twelfth century. The present project re-evaluates this vital period in legal history, by comparing not just English Common Law and Continental Civil Law (or “Ius commune”), but also the customary laws crucially important in Continental Europe even beyond the twelfth century. Such laws shared many features with English law, and the comparison thus disrupts the simplistic English:Continental distinction. The project first analyses the form, functioning and development of local, national, and supra-national laws. Similarities, differences, and influences will then be examined from perspectives of longer-term European legal development. Proper historical re-examination of the subject is very timely because of current invocation of supposed legal histories, be it Eurosceptic celebration of English Common Law or rhetorical use of Ius commune as precedent for a common European Law.
F. W. Maitland wrote that ‘there is not much “comparative jurisprudence” for those who do not know thoroughly well the things to be compared’. A comparative project requires collaboration – PI, senior researcher, post-doctoral and doctoral researchers, and Advisory Board. It also needs an integrated approach, through carefully selected areas, themes, and sources. The purpose is not just to provide geographical and thematic coverage but to assemble scholars who overcome divisions of approach in legal historiography: between lawyers and historians, between national traditions, between Common Law and Civil Law. The project is thus very significant in developing methods for writing comparative legal history - and legal history and comparative law more widely - in terms of uncovering patterns, constructing narratives, and testing theories of causation.

A highly significant division in present-day Europe is between two types of legal system: the Continental with foundations in Civil Law (law with an ultimately Roman law basis), and English Common Law. Both trace their continuous history back to the twelfth century. The present project re-evaluates this vital period in legal history, by comparing not just English Common Law and Continental Civil Law (or “Ius commune”), but also the customary laws crucially important in Continental Europe even beyond the twelfth century. Such laws shared many features with English law, and the comparison thus disrupts the simplistic English:Continental distinction. The project first analyses the form, functioning and development of local, national, and supra-national laws. Similarities, differences, and influences will then be examined from perspectives of longer-term European legal development. Proper historical re-examination of the subject is very timely because of current invocation of supposed legal histories, be it Eurosceptic celebration of English Common Law or rhetorical use of Ius commune as precedent for a common European Law.
F. W. Maitland wrote that ‘there is not much “comparative jurisprudence” for those who do not know thoroughly well the things to be compared’. A comparative project requires collaboration – PI, senior researcher, post-doctoral and doctoral researchers, and Advisory Board. It also needs an integrated approach, through carefully selected areas, themes, and sources. The purpose is not just to provide geographical and thematic coverage but to assemble scholars who overcome divisions of approach in legal historiography: between lawyers and historians, between national traditions, between Common Law and Civil Law. The project is thus very significant in developing methods for writing comparative legal history - and legal history and comparative law more widely - in terms of uncovering patterns, constructing narratives, and testing theories of causation.